About Me

Sunday, December 08, 2013

(Again, it's been a while since I've posted here, but life's been busy. Since my last entry I've married off another of my children and written, edited, and submitted another novel. Between all that and working for a living, there hasn't been much time for blogging. But I finally got around to a review of Ceremony of Innocence, a recent novel from Ignatius. Hopefully it won't be as long until my next post.)

For my birthday I
received a copy of the recently released Ceremony of Innocence
by Dorothy Cummings McLean. I'd
read the synopses and was intrigued, but wanted to find out just
where the author went with all those elements in her debut novel. I
was pleased by the quality of the writing – the
story drew me in easily and engaged me in the plot and characters.
This is important, because if “Catholic” authors are going to
escape the “Catholic literature ghetto” (you know – that
place where people buy
“Catholic works” in order to support the authors, not because
they necessarily enjoy the stories), then first and foremost the
authors need to be high quality artists. If this is what
McLean can
do in her first novel, I have
high hopes for her later efforts.

The
story takes place in and
around Frankfurt, Germany in
2008. The protagonist is
Catriona McLelland, a woman in her 30s who is Canadian by birth but
was raised in Scotland and now works as a field
reporter. (Though Catriona
isn't an example of the author writing herself into her own story, it
seems clear that Miss McLean is drawing on her own experience as a
foreign journalist to flesh out her characters.) “Cat”, as she
is known, lives the life of a modern urban professional. She is
divorced and awaiting word on her annulment, lives with her
decade-younger university student boyfriend,
and spends
time in clubs leveraging her low-level celebrity status to flit about
the edges of the privileged class of the wealthy and noble.

McLean
paints a picture of postmodern, post-Christian European culture that
is gritty, dingy, and a little depressing. Cat herself is no heroine
– she is a “tribal” Catholic who knows but does not live by the
tenets of her faith. She cannot claim ignorance. She has a
doctorate, understands the subtleties and nuances of the
Faith, works for a Catholic
news agency, and writes
“spiritual” books on the side. But
despite this
knowledge, her life far more reflects the values of the world in
which she lives than the ideals of the Kingdom of God. She's casual
about her occasional heavy drinking and drug use as
well as her concubinage with
her boyfriend . McLean handles the character well. Because the
story is told from Cat's
perspective in the first person, the reader is naturally sympathetic.
But as the plot unfolds, one gets a better picture of Catriona –
her condescending treatment of her boyfriend, her dalliance with the
amoral “butterfly set”, the implicit cynicism of her double life
as a spiritual and religion writer who lives in such moral confusion.
I found myself
sympathetic to Cat in the fullest sense, as uneasy and ambivalent
about her identity and behaviour as I can imagine such a person would
be herself.

The
plot centers around the entry of Suzy into Cat's settled existence.
Suzy is an idealistic young westerner who also hails from Canada,
which in her mind gives her a natural relationship
with Cat. Suzy has decided political opinions as well as (eventually)
an eye on Cat's boyfriend. Out of respect for their friendship, Suzy
is above board with Cat about this attraction, which introduces
tension into their relationship but does not end it.
The jaded, sophisticated Cat
initially views Suzy as a dilettante, a child with a cause and a
credit card. But
as the story unfolds and they are thrown together in some very
unusual circumstances, hints of deeper and more disturbing things
begin to surface. I won't
give away any critical details, but suffice it to say that it turns
out that Suzy is involved in some ugly stuff and comes to a bad end
(something that is known from the opening pages – the driving
question of the book
is at whose hands?) The most compelling part of the story is
watching the moral dilemma in
which Cat
finds herself as she struggles with the disturbing knowledge
she gains as the tale unfolds.
This tension is particularly acute when Cat's
boyfriend leaves her for Suzy – a development that has almost
nothing to do with Suzy's allure and everything to do with Cat's
waffling and duplicitous treatment of him.

As
I pondered the story and its
intricacies, one theme that became increasingly clear was how Cat was
the mother of Suzy. Not literally, of course – the two women were
only about 10 years apart in age – but philosophically. There will
always be high-minded crusaders with young heads on their young
shoulders, but ideally they would be assisted by wiser elders who, if
they haven't always walked paths of righteousness, at least gained
wisdom from the lessons learned when they didn't. Cat walks in
neither righteousness nor wisdom, and thus can provide neither good
guidance nor good example when
Suzy appears,
searching for a life of high
ideals and stringent standards, a cause to live up to and sacrifice
for. When she looked at Catholics
like Catriona, she saw
nothing of that, and thus looked elsewhere. If Cat and those like
her had been living a vibrant and dynamic faith, people like Suzy
might have an alternative to dangerous places where error is taught.

Even
though this type of story isn't my first choice to read, I found
Ceremony of Innocence
a good novel,
and hope to see more from Miss McLean in years to come. One bit of
technical advice I might offer: the story is told in a flashback mode
that gets a little confusing at times. It opens in the immediate
aftermath of some dramatic developments, and then goes back to fill
in the background of how matters came to this point. However, this
flicking back and forth between the “current” situation and the
“past” that explains it happens at several points in the story,
and I
struggled at times to figure out just what “present” I was in.
I understand this technique,
having used it myself, but with a story of this length and complexity
it proved a little clumsy. Perhaps
a more chronologically linear storyline would help the next work –
either that, or clearer delineations between what time the reader is
in. But
this is not a showstopper, and those who love thrillers set in exotic
locations and filled with dark secrets will not be disappointed by
Dorothy McLean.